While working on Wise Blood in the attic at the Fitzgerald’s house, O’Connor for the first time in her life felt secure enough to express her religious views in her fiction. However, like a medieval scholar, she needed the Greeks to help her communicate those views. O’Connor figured out how to write the ending of Wise Blood—a novel she had started a half-decade earlier and was struggling to finish—from her host Robert Fitzgerald, a Harvard professor who was translating Sophocles. O’Connor read Sophocles for the first time in Connecticut, and when she read Oedipus she knew that Hazel Motes, too, must blind himself. O’Connor uses the imagery of Greek mythology in several of her stories, and she follows the arc of Greek tragedy, of proud people brought low, in many of her plots.